Everything that reaches us is a signal.

A light, a voice, a face. Nothing arrives intact: whatever travels degrades on the way. What we call a sharp image is only a signal whose noise cannot yet be seen. It was there, too fine to see.

Here, it shows. One knows what one is looking at, without hesitation. It is not what the image shows that degrades, it is the image itself: it burns, runs, breaks into light. And everything happens at the edge: where the figure meets the world, no limit settles any more. Figure and world are made of the same signal.

Fever, when the world slips away. Waking in an unfamiliar room, not yet knowing where one is. The face of someone close, which one would know among a thousand and can no longer draw. Nothing has gone; nothing has an edge any more.

LSD is also the name of a substance associated with this condition, in which the boundaries between self and world melt without being erased.

The signal was never stable.

The Conceptual Ground

To perceive is not to receive. The signal arrives already altered by distance, light, air; within the eye itself, the information is reduced a hundredfold before it reaches the brain. The body alters it further, through fatigue, mood, physiology. What is missing, the brain fills in: it anticipates, completes, reconstructs. To see is to degrade and then rebuild, endlessly, and always slightly behind the world. There is no instant at which the image would be intact: degradation does not begin with memory, it begins with the gaze.

Between day and night there is a time that should not last: twilight, no longer the one and not yet the other. Physics knows such passages: brought to its critical point, a fluid is no longer liquid without being gas, and turns milky, opaque, luminous; but it only passes through. Some systems, fed continuously, hold there. These images hold, in the same way, a passage that should have closed. And in a passage no border settles, since nothing there is yet one thing or the other.

Recognising does not require tracing an outline. Form is carried by the whole, the masses, the relations; the outline, by detail. The subject holds; it is the limit that does not settle: the line is sharp here, lost there, and no line goes all the way round. Once only, in the middle of the hang, the series reaches the point where the subject itself wavers: a nebula of which one can no longer say whether it is figure or matter.

Nothing holds a disturbance back. It may remain minute or cross the whole. The cost of holding is concentrated nowhere: it is paid everywhere at once, but it shows at the edges, where there is a limit to undo. Degradation reaches the support, burn, stain, matter, as well as the signal itself, sampled, noisy, compressed. It is the same condition at two levels.

No original

The passage that lasts

Form without outline

Everywhere and nowhere

The figure is not in front of the world; it shares its signal. The world exceeds it, and yet only arrives through it: the two are woven from the same thread without being identical. To lose oneself has two senses, to stray and to be absorbed in what one looks at, and both are true here. Grief knows this: the world and the self change together, and one remains someone.

The signal was never stable.

Each work exists in a single state, chosen among several variations of the same composition. From one work to the next, the subject changes, and so does the degree, independently of it. The series shows one condition at different intensities. Each title names a threshold, or a condition that science delimits by thresholds. None names an impression.

This is not an instant caught between two stable states: the passage has no locatable beginning, and it does not close. The animated pieces carry this undecidability into time. At every instant, Zeno’s arrow occupies a precise place, and yet it flies: before them, one cannot decide whether the image is moving.

Getting lost

Degree

Neither before nor after